The Best Advice I Can Give You For Your Blog: Establish One, Then Launch Two More

(Blogger‘s Note: This post is targeted to bloggers who are working to build a strong social media platform – for those who are building a base for marketing their work. For those who simply enjoy a post now and then for the pure pleasure, this advice is absolutely NOT necessary. ~ steve)

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It’s taken four months for me to build a solid primary blog at this site. It started with a specific purpose, then it evolved. Through my keyboard punches it took on a life of its own, and I recognized it wasn’t the best of things. Instead of being the focused site I’d intended, it grew to become vague. Mid-way through its early life, it lost its own self-identity.

Over time I found myself writing on a variety of topics – whatever came to mind that I thought was important. It was general, mediocre and blase’.

I didn’t want my primary blog to be grey. I wanted it to be black and white.

Most of what I publish on this site is objective. There’s a casual commentary here and there, but mostly, it’s written in journalistic style, and moreover, it’s about building a platform for book marketing. When I recognized my focus had become more like a shotgun pattern than a single bullet, I had to consider my options.

One consideration was limiting the things I wanted to say. But I REALLY didn’t want to do that.

So I created another blog, a sister blog; and then another cousin blog.

And it’s the best move I’ve made to enhance the platform and achieve every purpose I wanted.

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Because I wanted the primary site to remain objective, I needed a second site where I could provide opinionated commentary. Objectivity is great, but there’s a huge place in the blogosphere for personal opinion, too. People lovesharing their opinions.

So I created something short and sweet. www.seventhingsidliketosay.wordpress.com is the place where I can offer “sidebar” commentary on an objective post in the primary blog. Link the two together with a short link on each post and you’re creating a web of activity that has a life of its own. Sometimes, readers get caught up in the web and find it hard to get out.

That’s what we all want for our sites, right? Readers will move back and forth between your sites if you make it easy for them.

Does that make sense?

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Then, Dana and I had the opportunity a few months back to do something truly unique. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, perhaps, to build a vacation home in Puerto Cayo, Ecuador. Our home is under construction there now.

I viewed it as a singular, focused adventure that I wanted to chronicle through publishing – for ourselves and interested readers and future expatriates.

So the cousin-blog became www.latitudeone.wordpress.com. It addresses our interest in expatriate living and is intended to inspire others to know that dreams can, in fact, be lived out.

Throw a little short link down at the bottom of a latitudeone post referring people back to the primary and sister blog works too. So the platform became a triangle with readers moving from one point to another with very little effort on my part.

This approach serves every purpose for me. It give’s me focused creative outlets at three specific distribution points, moves readers to and from point to point with easy links, and more often than not, a follower of one blog becomes a follower of the others, so the platform building is magnified x3.

If you’re purposefully working to build a strong social media platform, consider giving birth a happy “family” of blogs.